THE INTELLIGENT SMILE

Olof Palme – Sweden’s most famous politician – was shot to death on a February evening 1986 on the streets of Stockholm. In one night, the country of Sweden was transfigured. Palme is about his life and times, and the Sweden he created. About a man who altered history. For the first time, his entire family appears on film.

Palme was an upfront politician with a courage that put Sweden on the international map. He was raised in the intellectual and cultural environment of upper-class Södermalm in Stockholm – so he really understood the interests of power. In his younger days he travelled around Asia and saw with his own eyes what Western colonialism did to those regions. He also witnessed the backyards of capitalism when travelling around the US for several months after completing college in Ohio. His studies had trained him well in argumentation culture and back in Stockholm he fast became Prime Minister Tage Erlander’s personal secretary. Palme trod the boards of the political stage and in 1969 became Sweden’s youngest prime minister.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoopC3Rn294

In the documentary Palme we witness the political group around him looking a little naive at first. But they successfully fulfilled the task of establishing the Swedish welfare state, which Erlander had embarked on during his 23 years as prime minister.

The two film directors Maud Nycander and Kristina Lind say their motive was to tell new generations who Palme really was. It’s a classical doc with the well-known character-driven chronological narrative. The film circles around Palme’s adolescence and adulthood with a large selection of archival material and interviews with family and politicians close to him. Nycander is an experienced doc filmmaker in Sweden, also known for Closed Psychiatric Ward (2010) from the closed psychiatric institution at St.Görans, where, over one and a half years, she followed the patients who had been committed. She and her director Lind have now spent years on Palme, for which they also convinced his wife Lisbeth to participate in interviews. They chose to avoid getting too deep into the murder mystery and the shoddy police work that followed but start the film with a BBC interview where Palme is asked what should be written in his obituary and end with some scenes and sounds from the night of the murder.

Olof Palme

The film – well edited by the Dane Niels Pagh Andersen and others – never loses your attention. And if your eyelids should start to droop, you will surely be roused by some of the bomb sounds from the soundtrack that make the cinema shake – underlining that we live in a violent international world.

Selected from 350 hours of film archives, the film shows us Palme in several interesting political situations. The multiplicity of the film should definitely satisfy a large audience, or new generations, but I do miss some deeper insights into a few of those situations.

Let me mention some of those political situations. Palme’s public resistance to the Vietnam War; the US shelling of Hanoi in 1972; Apartheid in South Africa: his criticism of the Franco regime; the Prague spring of ‘68; and the Pinochet’s ’72 coup-de-etat. Palme was clearly outspoken, he also received internal criticism for breaking with Sweden’s “neutrality” line.

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